Innovation comes when the wrong products are used by the wrong people in
the wrong way at the wrong time. That's the nature of great successes.

On whether Bill Clinton or Bill Gates will have a greater impact on the US

Neither. The mere body composed of jillions of cells called "Bill" is not
the point. It's the Gates-wanna-be and Clinton-wanna-be phenomena. Right
now, the Gates phenomenon is having more of an impact than the Clinton
phenomenon.

On digital libertarianism

I don't think it's centered around the digital crowd. I've long prided
myself on being - besides Warren Buffett - the only Democrat businessperson
in America, and on being a quasi-libertarian. I assumed that I was only
one of a select few. Then four or five years ago, the Stanford University
alumni magazine published this very well-done survey of Stanford and Harvard
alumni. To my great dismay, I was dead center in the crowd. I just hated
it. Part of my problem is that whenever I read the ballot propositions,
I'm always appalled by the Libertarian position. They aren't libertarian.
They are anarchist.

On his life's mission

When Robert McNamara was a captain in the US Army Air Corps in 1943, the
organization was enormous. It didn't know where all its planes were parked.
McNamara and his whiz kids did great work teaching the Army Air Corps to
know where the fucking planes were. So I do have to give the group credit
for that. But, unfortunately, what they implemented became dogma. And as
the world became more chaotic, those centralized models were no longer
appropriate. My entire life is an effort to exorcise the demon of Robert
McNamara from society.

On his role models

I first studied about Hewlett-Packard in 1979. I know its story in great
detail. It went from being a technical company to a legendary success,
a model for other companies. Its success was due to its wonderfully decentralized
organization that later went through seven years of centralization, followed
by a period led by a renegade executive who lived out in the boondocks,
and then another era headed by a former chairman who held onto a billion
dollars' worth of stock, kept his ear to the ground, and parachuted back
in to the company at exactly the right moment. What can we learn from this?
Not a fucking thing, except it's really great to be lucky.

On his reading habits

The most important thing I read on a regular basis is the Life section,
section D, of USA Today.
It's not as embarrassing as reading tabloids like
the National Enquirer, but the trend stuff going on in section
D is a lot
more predictive of what's going to happen five years from now than The
Wall Street Journal.

On being an old fart

I'm 54, and what I say is total bullshit. I am one of those monks working
on the illumination of a scroll at the advent of the printing press.
Seventeen-year-olds
don't have the language I have. They don't have the basic scientific training.
They're completely inarticulate about what they're doing. But they are
doing it.

On what he tells executives at his high-priced seminars

The only way to survive these days is to do some shit and see what happens.
Every now and then you do shit that, for reasons that are completely unspecifiable,
turns out to be big shit, as opposed to little shit. You just have to make
sure there is enough shit going on that some big shit happens.